He Should Form a Club with Christine Schutt
(And Matthew Sharpe Can Be Treasurer)

As a rule, I no longer link to New York Observer stories because they no longer offer free access to anything more than seven days old, but you might want to look at this week's front-page story on Sam Lipsyte, the fiction writer known and loved among bookbloggers for his "combustible mixture of aphoristic wordplay and wild, explicit invective," as Wesley Yang puts it. The article centers around the difficulties Lipsyte had in finding an American publisher for his second novel, Home Land, which was finally released as a trade paperback original after twenty-four publishers refused it, some against the advice of their editors:

"Long after other agents would have moved on to easier sales, his agent, Ira Silverberg, persisted. He sold the book in England, where it came out in February 2004 to rave reviews. Mr. Silverberg's crusading zeal was about more than what promised to be a rather meager commission. (The book sold for $15,000.) Mr. Silverberg had something he wanted to prove. 'There's nothing wrong with the book,' Mr. Silverberg apostrophized, thinking of the editors that turned it down. 'There’s something wrong with you! And to the powers that be that didn't find this book funny, to them we say now: Ha, ha. Because a lot of others did.'

Based on firsthand experience, I'm currently recommending Home Land with full enthusiasm, in the full knowledge that you're either going to love it like I did or be utterly nonplussed. Go on, give it a try!